On October 15, Joe Biden stated in an interview with CNN that anyone who defies a subpoena from the House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted. Despite Biden’s relative silence on the issue so far, his statement came as former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon refused to comply with his Sept. 23 subpoena on dubious claims related to executive privilege. The Biden Administration’s brusque approach is likely to avoid accusations of over-politicizing a legal process, an accusation that has been levelled on numerous occasions against the Jan. 6 committee itself. The same hesitance has been evident at the Department of Justice (DOJ) throughout the process; comments have been reserved and pragmatic, offering little to no room for accusations of partisanship.

On Oct. 22, the House of Representatives voted 229-209 to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the subpoena, landing the issue on the desk of Merrick Garland and the DOJ. With this move and the other three simultaneously issued subpoenas of former Trump aides, the Committee appears to be circling the former president.

Trump, for his part, filed a lawsuit on Oct. 18 against Rep. Bennie Thompson and the Jan. 6 Committee (which he chairs) for “Sending an illegal, overbroad, and unfounded records request to the Archivist of the United States.” The lawsuit was more accurately in response to the fact that Biden refused to assert executive privilege over the documents requested, which Trump’s complaint calls a “political ploy.”

It is clear from Trump’s lawsuit and Bannon’s evasiveness that they each have incentives to block the committee’s investigation. Whether this is because the records contain damning evidence of misbehavior, or because he believes the committee will misinterpret and misconstrue them to get him in legal trouble, is unclear. The legal community has begun to discuss routes to prosecuting Trump himself for his actions on Jan. 6, some recommending multiple charges like conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding and extortion. Others suggest that his laid-back approach to stopping the insurrection in light of his official duty to “Take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” as outlined in Article II Section 3 of the Constitution qualifies as aiding and abetting. If this is a valid argument, then Trump is an accomplice, meaning that the former president is subject to the same crimes as the rioters, according to University of Chicago Law School professor Albert Alschuler.

That is a lot. I am no constitutional scholar, nor are most of the people who will read this column. But as the Jan. 6 Committee closes in on Trump and his inner circle to investigate what caused the insurrection, the general public needs to come to grips with the possible outcomes of the investigation. This investigation is unprecedented, and has the potential to go deep into the events of Jan. 6. We have to begin to ask ourselves, seriously and soberly, what we want from this.

The day was horrendous. We as a country need to figure out how to heal from it and how to best move forward. There are a few things to emphasize as we do so. For one, we need to figure out the truth of the matter. The American people need to know what happened for our own sake and for the sake of future Americans. Timothy Snyder, a Yale History professor, emphasized this point in an interview, saying “The January putsch is the day in infamy that we have to get right for historical purposes. If this becomes a myth of victimhood … then the country is in trouble”.

Inevitably, following the establishment of a narrative are the legal proceedings that are at the heart of the whole issue. Trump, should we find out that he committed crimes relating to Jan. 6, can be prosecuted. What should we think about this? How should we react if we find out that he did conspire to overthrow the election in this specific way? I am no fan of Trump’s, but prosecuting and potentially indicting a former president is nothing to be celebrated. At the very least, it would paint a grim picture of the state of our country; at most, it could be the impetus for more violence and unrest. Throwing former heads of state into prison (whether they deserve it or not) is reminiscent of countries heading into or out of autocracies. On the other hand, impunity for inciting the violence that caused multiple deaths and sought to uproot our democratic process surely cannot be the solution either. Alschuler offered that Trump should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting but then pardoned by Biden, noting that “The time to forgive Trump is not now, and the way to forgive him is not for the Justice Department to rule out prosecution from the outset.”

The laypeople (all of us) need to keep our eyes on the prize here. The rah rah of our own partisanship cannot take the spotlight. Given the plethora of potential approaches to prosecuting Trump in light of whatever evidence arises, we must try to remember what the point of investigating him is. Our first priority needs to be healing, not redemption. That said, if we are going to heal, we need to know the truth about that day, and consequences for actions must be handed out. As the investigation edges into murkier waters, as the Biden White House and DOJ potentially get more involved, and as legal action against top aides and the former president himself become more imminent, tensions are bound to flare up. If we want to maintain any sort of civility, the law must be creatively used in a way that both strongly disavows any violations on or leading up to that day and allows for some form of unity, all while promoting the establishment of law over politics.

It happened on the Thursday of the first week of school. I walked into my classes that week, excited to resume in-person learning. I was going to meet new people, be part of a community again and feel like I could make those important connections I missed while we were online. The world was a bright shining sea of people to talk to and classes to walk to. Life was beautiful and I had nothing to worry about. Nothing could go wrong.

It only took three days of in-person classes before someone sitting next to me let out a sound that had become foreign to me after about two years of lockdown and social distancing. Thinking back, the noise they made could have been completely normal, but to my recently hypochondriac ears, it sounded like my classmate rattled out the deepest, throatiest cough ever coughed by a human. Props to them for what seemed like a hard-fought battle to stifle it, but once that thing scratched and clawed its way out from the deepest corners of their chest, I sized them up a little differently.

I mean, who were they, I thought, to come into this classroom sick when we are all trying so desperately to get some semblance of normality back? What if it’s COVID-19? If you get me sick and I can’t come to classes or see my friends any more, have you thought of that? I assume you got your vaccine, but who really knows? Yuck. I angled my chair away from them a little bit (what this practically accomplished I did not know then and do not know now), scooted a little further away, and continued class. In my head, when I remember the incident, I still picture a cloud of virus particles seeping from their mask.

From that moment, my view of in-person classes was dimmer, albeit slightly, and my eyes were a little bit more open to the realities of going to in-person classes again. Being near people in close proximity, even when masked and vaccinated, does make it more likely that you contract COVID-19 if only because you are exposed to it more often. For someone like me, who is (or likes to think he is) relatively healthy, vaccinated and living with similar such people, the higher exposure to COVID-19 was a negligible aspect of returning to in-person classes. I was lucky to have been able to return to classes with my blinders on, thinking almost exclusively about socializing in class and putting COVID-19 worries on the backburner.

But, as it happens, seeing people more frequently means getting sick with all kinds of fun illnesses, and by the third week of school my roommates and I started to come down with something. None of our symptoms screamed that we had COVID-19, but we thought that having one of us schedule a test at the Rec was only right. I sent an email to my professor, telling him the situation and he understood and provided accommodations. My test came back negative, and given that my symptoms were mild, I headed to all three of my in-person classes the next day.

In class, as I sniffled, coughed here and there and gave off a general air of being unwell, I could see why classmates may be wary of sitting next to me. I held back all signals of sickness I could, and at one point I even considered telling my partner for a class activity that I was a little under the weather, but had gotten my negative test; it was impossible to do so without addressing the elephant in the room, and so I left it.

I buckle a little under the weight of my own hypocrisy when I think about those two episodes. By a perfect sequence of events, I landed right in the same shoes as the girl sitting next to me that first week; the girl that I viscerally judged for having come to class sick, and hoped that no one would judge me. I realize now that while I stick by my decision to go to class that day, that is only because I have all the information about the condition I was in. I felt comfortable with the idea that my classmates should entrust their safety to my decision making. I wanted them to give me the exact trust that I did not even consider giving to my classmate.

We are never going to know the length to which someone next to us has gone to protect the rest of us from the pandemic. After all, most COVID-19 spread is asymptomatic, so if a cough or two here and there puts us on edge, we should be much more worried about the majority of us that are not hacking up a lung in class. We will not know if those sitting next to us have been tested and vaccinated, what they do on the weekends or whether their friends are vaccinated. These things are hard to confirm even when someone does tell us, and this type of constant confirmation should not be a goal of ours. Look, I am all for vaccination and mask requirements, and I get a test at the Rec everytime I feel an echo of a whisper of a tingle in my throat. But at a certain point, we need to be comfortable with the fact that we cannot control the minute behavior of the people around us, especially if we ourselves are not part of or living with someone in an at-risk population. If not for our connections to those classmates, for our own sanity. I hear people all too often tell stories similar to the two above, and I wonder how long it will take for us to be comfortable with the many implications of living alongside other people again.

Joe Biden is acutely aware of his predecessor. From the very beginning of his campaign, it was clear that the selling point that he and his circle wanted to focus on was his ability to calm, unify and ease the tension that had become characteristic of the Trump era. Biden’s slogans, from “Unite for a Better Future” to “Build Back Better” are deployed in the hope of making Americans realize that some of the most immediate and important issues we face today need not be politicized —they are in fact, in our common interest.

From his first United Nations General Assembly speech, it has become clear that the president would like to address global challenges from a similar starting point. With his audience reticent and wary in the wake of the former president’s more insular diplomacy, Biden chose to focus on those same common cause issues that took the stage at home. He chose not to mention China explicitly, giving time to issues like climate change and COVID-19. He announced the following day at his Virtual COVID-19 Summit that, among other things, the U.S. would pony up the money for an extra billion doses of the Pfizer vaccine to donate abroad, making our total contribution to the global cause over 3 billion.

Given that our current domestic COVID-19 challenge is more ideological than practical, it makes sense that we would shift our attention abroad — we have plenty of vaccine doses, we just need people to take them. The lion’s share was quickly snatched up by rich countries who could risk signing contracts to buy vaccines in the nascent stages of development, while poorer countries and their populations had to wait. As of writing this article, over 6 billion doses have been administered globally (keep in mind that some require two doses for full vaccination), yet only about 2% of citizens of low-income countries have received even a single shot.

So, with such a clear and present threat, why has Biden’s plan drawn the ire of some public health experts, not to mention some residents of the very countries it is intended to assist?

Some reasons lie in the actual promises and focuses of the summit and the accompanying fact sheet that details its targets. For example, the plan provides money for shots ($3 billion in 2021 and $7 billion in 2022), but it will not provide for other necessary costs of quickly getting those shots into actual arms such as increased workforce (and their training) and health system strengthening. Without kicking in real dollars to support the administration of vaccines, it will be difficult for low-income countries to vaccinate their populations.

A telling issue further arises from what was left out by the promises in the fact sheet and the virtual summit itself. Specifically, there is a glaring lack of information regarding intellectual property issues that get in the way of countries manufacturing the vaccines themselves. The public health community has acknowledged time and again the need for countries to mandate the sharing of intellectual property in such a historic event. Instead, the rights to vaccine manufacturing remain firmly in the hands of the original owners, leaving low-income states reliant on big companies and powerful nations to give them vaccines.

A message focused on our unity under shared struggles is refreshing; we will be in trouble if we continue to let politics bog down COVID-19 or climate change. But not letting countries handle their own manufacture of the vaccines when that seems to be the necessary step is not as helpful as it could be. Real international unity in regard to COVID-19 demands that all nations are given the opportunity to explain what they need and how they need it done, and then responses from the international community that go further than shrouded gatekeeping. Giving away vaccines is without a doubt a good thing. But a message of unity that maintains a paternalistic and philanthropic relationship between rich countries and poorer ones is not as strong as it purports to be.

“We should be all covered here for close, does anyone want to clock out early?”

I learned to remain quiet longer than others when my manager asked this question at the end of slow days with a full staff. Eventually, around the point that protracted courtesy turns to awkwardness, some other student worker would chime in, “Yeah, if no one else wants to, I can go. I have to get to my other job.” The volunteer would pack up their stuff to head out, and I would stay the extra 30 minutes to close up before retreating home to my homework or some social outing.

During my year and half tenure at the University of Minnesota bookstore, I came to be intimately acquainted with the difficulty faced by students with less financial support than myself, the intense workload they endure, and the resourcefulness they display in spite of what seemed to me to be few opportunities for assistance. In sharp contrast to the experience of myself and most in my personal friend group, who have comparably few commitments, many of the students with whom I worked were in constant states of movement, shifting attention from one occupation to another in a manner that would have seemed desultory had it not been, for them, necessary. When I went home at the end of the day to take care of chores or school work, some of my fellow coworkers were out working somewhere else.

I remember one occasion during which — not without some ignorance — I expressed surprise that the kid I was talking to worked three jobs that semester along with his course load. As the conversation proceeded, he told me about being a first generation college student, and that his parents and the scholarships he had applied for and received could only do so much. He told me about handling his own expenses while balancing course work. When I asked him about how he manages to complete school work and pay his way through college, he told me that he did his best, but that academic excellence came second to the necessity of paying for the opportunity to study at all.

There are many benefits to a University job, including a healthy work environment and flexible hours, but I would not recommend them to someone looking for a lucrative position or even, for that matter, to make a decent buck. As of April 7 of this year, the University of Minnesota Office of Human Resources reports that the minimum wage for student jobs was $10.08, and the average wages (depending on job family) range from $11.03-$12.18. Critically, this data reflects student wages systemwide, i.e. the averages of wages across all campuses.

The University’s system-wide minimum wage is in accordance with Minnesota law, which has set the state-wide minimum at $10.08. Because the University system is technically owned and operated by the Minnesota State Government, it is exempt from the Minneapolis Minimum Wage Ordinance. As a result, despite the historic ordinance that is set to incrementally raise the city’s minimum wage to $15/hr by July 1, 2024 (July 1, 2022 for businesses employing over 100 workers), student workers on the Twin Cities campus are paid less than what their own city has deemed equitable.

The current city-wide minimum wage in Minneapolis is $12.50 for small businesses and $14.50 for larger ones. Though it is acknowledged as a state-run public institution, the University functions as a large business in many capacities. Even if it follows Minnesota rules for paying full-time students that work part time (a case which allows businesses to pay 85% of the minimum wage), the Minneapolis students would be deserving of $12.36/hr according to their city, and students in other municipalities would earn as little as $8.57/hr.

The issue, then, is technically not a legal one. The University is allowed to pay students a minimum wage that reflects the state law rather than the city’s law. But the view from the ground is incongruous with the legal justification. The choice to apply the same wage rules broadly like this misses the fact that the populations of different cities and counties have very different experiences. The very fact that both Minneapolis and St. Paul have taken minimum wage into their own hands reflects a need that is specific to their constituency, and that will likewise have specific effects on the economy of their city, further differentiating the experiences of their population from those in another municipality.

Raising this campus’ minimum wage is not going to completely eliminate all of the difficulties faced by some of my former coworkers, but it could certainly help. More pay may mean fewer hours, which in turn means more time freed up for studying, which, as we shouldn’t forget, is supposed to be the reason we come to higher education in the first place.

Of course, more assistance may be needed by certain students in the form of scholarships, financial aid, etc., but asking a campus to comply with the minimum wage ordinance of the city it occupies (even if not legally obligated to do so) seems like a relatively easy decision that acknowledges the lived experiences of the students that not only study here, but who offer their time and effort to the University through work.

I took the job at the bookstore because I wanted to find a kind community and to have some extra spending money in my pocket. I enjoyed my time there quite a bit; the atmosphere is forgiving, generally upbeat and the employees and managers are always friendly. However, when my life got busy, I decided to go on call. I could afford to work by picking up shifts that others had to drop if it meant making sure my academics did not suffer. And this is a crucial difference between myself and many other student workers. Sometimes, academic success is contingent on whether or not your pockets can manage a dropped shift here and there. When you are paid less than your city’s minimum wage, the chances that you can manage this are certainly lower. The Twin Cities campus is not legally bound to follow the Minneapolis Minimum Wage Ordinance, but nor is it bound by law to stay down at the state-wide minimum. It is in the interest of the mental and financial health of the student workers that they are paid what their city has deemed a livable wage, and it should be, in turn, in the interest of the University.

I first started hearing about the rise in violent crime in Minneapolis about a year and a half ago, just before the pandemic came to the United States. At the very beginning of 2020, my parents began urging me to always walk in a group and not stay out late, and news articles and screenshots of SAFE-U alerts poured into group chats with friends. Minneapolis appeared more dangerous by the week. And when COVID-19 began to sweep through the country, so did a “wave of violence,” that eventually resulted in a historic 30% yearly increase in homicides in major cities across the United States. News reports increased, politicians shifted their focus towards combating this new trend amid social unrest and bad police public relations, and there was almost no escaping the idea that somehow COVID-19 was responsible for the increase. And with the compounding effects of job loss, cultural anxiety and financial insecurity, maybe it was — this time. True, the increase this last year was unprecedented in that it came on the tail of a long decline, and it deserves our attention. But if we only think of solutions that address the current increase in violent crime, we are sorely missing the point.

It is a little absurd to only compare current rates of crime to our own past rates of crime. If we do that, we quickly realize that even with the dramatic uptick, we are still “well below historic highs” for the national homicide rate, according to a report from the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice. A finding like this takes some wind out of the crime-panic sails, especially given that many say the (very real) rate increase is simply a consequence of this once-in-a-lifetime situation. If we only look to our own recent past when making these comparisons, the cause becomes simplified (the increase must just be the pandemic, it will go away) and the effect seems less severe (we are actually around half the historic absolute homicide rate set in 1995, so why care?). But when in recent history were American violent crime rates acceptable?

Describing the current situation as COVID-19 induced implies that all we need to do is stop the surge to get things back to normal. But what is “normal” for the United States? It is nearly impossible to argue that the United States is not a violent country given our status. We consistently rank higher than other stable, developed nations for gun violence and homicides (the same statistic with a 30% increase) despite our decreasing numbers in recent years. In fact, many of the same countries saw an overall drop in crime during the pandemic, including property theft, burglaries and assault with negligible or inconsistent numbers on homicides. Something about our COVID-19 crime numbers is different from those of other countries. The rise in violence is not simply a result of COVID-19. It is a result of the United States’ continued trouble with violence, influenced in part by the pandemic. If the root cause were the virus, other countries would have experienced the same thing.

This is not a random blip in our overall relationship with violent crime, not a random boost in our numbers. I have heard a lot of people describe this plight as “the violence epidemic,” but I would go further. Gun violence in the U.S. is unlike real epidemics like H1N1 or Ebola, which came and left our country relatively quickly. High rates of violence have always been present, especially in our cities, sometimes aggravated by factors like COVID-19, and we apparently have yet to find or implement any lasting solution to it. If all we want to do is get ourselves back to those pre-COVID-19 numbers, sure, add a few more cops to those neighborhoods experiencing the largest increases as many politicians advocate for, or add more streetlights to high-crime areas. That may work in the meantime. But if we want to stop the problem at its root — brace yourself — it may take some more enduring structural help.

Stricter gun laws will certainly help some of the root causes for our brand of violence; it has been reported since the 1990s that the U.S. has less of a crime problem and more of a violence and homicide problem, which correlates highly with the amount of guns (legal and illegal) that we have in civilian hands. But even gun control will never be the catch-all solution to the multifaceted issue of gun violence.

Greek philosopher Aristotle famously said, “Poverty is the parent of crime and revolution.” The quote can be troublesome in certain contexts, but it points out the reasons why many people are put in situations in which a violent crime may be committed like financial insecurity or community instability. Aristotle obviously falls short in his failure to recognize the multiplicity of other reasons that one may commit a violent crime, nonetheless the correlation between poverty and violent crime rate does pan out. If we really want to address violent crime, we as a society need to start putting our money where our mouth is. We need to help provide stable living conditions and more routes to financial stability and mobility in certain communities. Ways to begin this are through long-term investment in affordable housing and our underappreciated public schools, not by additional police presence alone.

The current attention given to violence in politics and the media, despite its laser-focus on the increase, can and should catalyze a national conversation about violent crime that goes far beyond the current situation. If it takes this dramatic increase to get our attention, so be it. I just hope that we stay focused on the broader picture. The rise may in some ways be caused by COVID-19, but our baseline levels of violent crime are far too high and will remain so long after vaccinations.

This week as I drove between work and home, I decided to turn on the first Bob Dylan album I ever listened to, a compilation of some of his unreleased songs and versions of songs titled “The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3.” The album is riddled with old straight-folk gems from his Greenwich Village days, when his lyrics were almost always politically charged. Shuffling through the album, I came across a song called “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” that had me laughing out loud to myself. Over solo guitar, Dylan speaks from the perspective of a man who joins the John Birch Society and begins his “American duty,” searching his neighborhood high and low for communists. Failing to find any among the sidewalk bushes or in his car door or toilet, he begins to imagine them sitting in a TV set that shocks him, blaming communists for the pain of the zap. At that point, his paranoia has distorted his reality so much that he calls former presidents “Russian spies,” and thinks Betsy Ross put red stripes on the flag because she herself must have been a “red.” In the end, out of a job and with nothing else to do, the unnamed narrator sits at home and investigates himself. The last line hangs on an exhausted “good God.”

The song is funny. The audience in the recording, presumably all leftist New York beatniks, cracks up at most of the song’s lines as Dylan thumbs his nose at McCarthyism. So why was I left feeling sorry for the unnamed narrator, a man who ate up hateful and paranoid propaganda, only to hurt himself in the end? Well, while I laughed at the jokes in the song, I could not find it in myself to completely blame the “Bircher.” While most of our discussion about McCarthyism relates to how it attacked freedom of speech and expression, the song taught me a slightly different lesson. Dylan opted to use the perspective of the narrator to show how those who support an ideology that demonizes dissent also become victims in their own right, manipulated, isolated, and unable to think freely.

While the man in the song never existed, he is representative of possible effects of McCarthyist tactics, which certainly did exist. I am not a historian, so I am going to stay away from the specifics of the Red Scare of the 1950s and focus more broadly on the strategy of inciting paranoia — fear mongering. My understanding of its aim goes like this: if you can make a population afraid of an ideology or party, you can discredit anything that party says or does on account of their vilification. If the other party is successfully discredited in the public eye, your party gets more power and gains more control over the political narrative. Once this control is established, you are free to completely sway those who have ascribed to your ideology because you offer the only set of “credible” facts. This is what was, in effect, done to the man in the story, and thus he had to create a reality that fit with the set of facts that his ideology offered. As a hyper-conservative in the 1950s, this meant that if he did not see communists anywhere, they must be hiding. The only possible reality to him was that there were, beyond any shadow of a doubt, communist insurgents in America, so he made them up.

Fear-mongering is a profoundly deep form of manipulation. It is not time, place, or party specific — yes, both parties can and do participate in one way or another. So although plenty of blame lies with the man himself (or any person who allows themselves to be manipulated this way), I think it is arrogant to approach the topic without acknowledging its power. From what I see today, it seems like most people can be manipulated into fearing or hating another group of people if they 1) have a pre-disposed distaste for or concern about the group that can be taken advantage of (emphasis on “can be taken advantage of”) and 2) are presented with strong evidence of the group’s danger to society, whether it is actually present or not. Once these two requirements are met, one shuts out any opinion or idea of said group, and whichever ideology that controls the person’s set of facts pushes them to hate the opposing group more and more.

In “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” Dylan describes an episode that seems even more relevant today than in his own time. While anti-communist groups like the John Birch Society (JBS) and the American Public Relations Forum carried some cultural weight along with the famous Hollywood Blacklists, much of what we call McCarthyism was reserved to organizational government action. For how significant it was, it was more centralized than what I see as the manipulation we face today. We still have groups like the JBS and politicians that gain their popularity from scaring people about the other party, but there is an added element, one that is harder to point directly at.

What we face now that Dylan’s Bircher did not is the internet: social media echo chambers, youtube channels that have flashy titles to gain clicks and blog post rabbit holes all amplify the issue, creating more and more paranoid false realities. We now use our own voices to spiral each other further into these “false realities,” to the point where someone on the other side of the aisle would need a translator to understand our message.The result is that, though I would not go so far as to say we are McCarthyist, party lines have started to look like untraversable valleys.

So, when I hear the song, when I look at the events of Jan. 6 or COVID-19 spikes in states with vaccine hesitancy, or just our political division in general, what comes to my mind? I cannot help but feel that we are in one way or another being taken advantage of. By allowing ourselves to be manipulated into fearing and hating the other party, we are allowing ourselves to be robbed of something, something essential to any democracy: the ability to have difficult, but civil, conversations.

No, no one is taking away our freedom of speech, per se. But, while specific interpretations of the First Amendment have been historically muddy, one has to assume that at some level, the writers of it hoped it would preserve our ability to have open discussions, political and otherwise. The promotion of discussion is baked into the First Amendment.

I believe that almost as essential as our freedom of speech is our freedom to listen; inseparable from our freedom to express our ideas is our privilege to engage with the ideas of others. The protection of our voices is fruitless if we do not also protect our ability and right to listen to others, as there is simply no need to infringe upon our ability to speak if we can be manipulated into not listening to each other. While officials battle over what to do about misinformation (or misleading information) online and in speeches, we must start the battle at home and online. We cannot let our distaste for other opinions be taken advantage of. We must constantly encourage dissenting opinions that are relevant and credible, and we must take a hard look at those who share our own beliefs and how much of their message focuses on demonizing the other side.

It can be difficult to withhold character judgments about someone based on their political beliefs, but that is the burden of having productive dialogue. When we watch the news, vote for politicians and amplify certain voices on social media, we need to ask ourselves if the figures we are interacting with are playing into the vilification of whole groups of people on the other side. Continuing this way simply is not viable. Until we stop encouraging the message (with our time, money, votes) that every stance on a complicated issue is simply the product of how evil one side or the other is, we will all remain that paranoid, unnamed narrator in Bob Dylan’s song, searching for boogeymen that do not exist.

As an incoming third-year, I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, whether that means going to graduate school or starting a career or something else. That said, I had not really thought about the fact that college is halfway over until one recent high school graduate asked me if I had any college advice for him. I hesitated for a moment. Who am I to say? But as I let his question sink in, I realized how much we all learn in that pivotal first half of college. For many of us, it was our first time living alone, and, obviously, there was quite a bit to navigate. During the couple weeks that followed him asking this question, I compiled some of the biggest lessons I learned about college into a little list.

School

Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way.

My first school tip is probably the most important academic lesson I have ever learned: you should probably start taking notes, and if you do not know what to take notes on, take them on everything. I found that, after four years of basically note-free highschool, I had no idea how to do it. When I went to study for my first PSY 1001 test, I had taken lecture notes nearly word for word like a stenographer; nonetheless, I did well on the test.

During my first semester of college, I workshopped different forms of note taking until I found one that worked for me, and then I never stopped.

Another practice that has helped me stay focused in class is always picking a front-row seat (or turning on the Zoom camera in online classes). For fear of sounding like a square or a teacher’s pet, I have to say I do this to keep myself focused, not to gain any brownie points with a professor (some will at least remember your face because you sit in the front of the class, while some will never think twice about it). It always astounded me how many kids were on their phones in college classes, which was impossible at my small highschool. If you are worried about doing this, just sit in front of the class (odds are you are paying a decent chunk of cash to be here, might as well pay attention).

Finally, I would say that you should get comfortable with shifting your long-term academic goals. I feel like everyone tells us this at orientation and welcome week, but few of us actually internalize it. Throughout life, most of us have switched up our answer to what we want to be when we grow up quite a bit, and that tendency does not change just because you start your college path. Follow your current interests, and trust what they tell you. Projecting into the future is a tricky game, but finding, and then doing, something that interests you or makes for fulfilling work may make it a little easier.

Social

I am not sure what the world has told you about who is in your group and who is not, but college is the time to figure that out for yourself. It is time to define for yourself what puts someone in your “in-group” and what puts them in your “out-group.” Make sure that you know what you really value in people, then surround yourself with that type of person; design your social circle with intention, based on your own values. Additionally, try your best to make your out-group (those you see as fundamentally different from you and your peers) as small as possible.

Furthermore, when you have started to make these new friends, you may feel some anxiety about how you present yourself to them. My advice is, of course, to be yourself. I add that not only is it just more relaxing, but my theory is that it will actually help you find friends that you will relate to more. If you show someone your true self and they do not like it, that is fine, because you probably do not want to spend much time around them either: you probably have different ideas of what you want your friendships to look like.

Self

With all of the life shifts that happen when you start college (especially if you live in dorms), it is very easy to have a mind that runs a mile a minute monitoring your homework, your new friendships, extracurriculars; it may get exhausting. My advice is to understand when you should listen to and trust yourself, and when you may need to take a breath. I found myself in the habit of over-planning to the point where I could not even think straight about what I needed and wanted to get done. When something like this would start to happen, I found it was best to just turn my brain off and relax: these were just not times to trust myself. Learning when to take a breather is important; pay attention to your stress levels and how they affect your behavior.

Lastly, one of the most important things I have learned in my personal life since starting college is to figure out how fear determines your actions. This is a broad statement, I know (a little vague, too). Really what I mean is that sometimes, especially in unfamiliar situations, we can make decisions based on unfounded fear or worry. For example, early in my college career I missed opportunities to connect with people because I was worried about how to present myself to them. Should I have worried? According to my own paragraph about being yourself, no. The power of fear or worry is not anything that we can completely rid ourselves of; it will always play some sort of a role. However, my advice is to pay attention to those hesitations. Ask yourself: are you scared of something? Should you be?

A lot changes day to day during that transition to college life. Everyone is going to learn different, sometimes conflicting lessons based on the challenges they encounter in that transition. These are some of mine. When I get the advice question, I clearly have a little repository to reach into, but my overarching advice is always be ready for a surprise. College will never be what you think it will be. In all parts of life (for me school, social, and self) do your best to prepare for what you can, and accept what you cannot predict; uncertainty can be pretty exciting.

Last week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland released a memorandum that called for a systematic review of policies and procedures related to capital punishment. Along with ordering the review, he reinstated the long-standing moratorium on federal executions that former Attorney General William Barr had ended. Garland cited a commitment to “fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital cases” and a worry about recent policies’ “consistenc[y] with the principles articulated.” But, while Garland’s office plays a strong card both in its explicit dedication to a policy reread and its action to halt federal executions pending such a review, a further question arises from the wording of his memo. Is such a thing as humane execution even possible if the justice system acknowledges its own limits and fallibility?

Currently, 27 states still practice some form of capital punishment, and it is legal at the federal level (despite frequent and often long-standing blocks by the Department of Justice). Though the Eighth Amendment bars the use of “cruel and unusual punishment” for a crime, the Supreme Court ruled that executions are in fact not “invariably” in violation of the Eighth. The debate has blazed on regardless, as people wonder whether or not they want their government to have the power to execute when they see fit. While states have practiced executions since the inception of our nation and before, their use in relation to federal crimes only began with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. Since then, there have been 15 congressional attempts to abolish the federal death penalty, none of which have gotten far off the ground. States have debated amongs themselves whether or not they should implement it.

Responses to calls for abolition have been so weak that one almost becomes suspicious of their proponents. Popular responses include: a) that it costs more to house inmates for life than to execute them, b) that it deters the type of horrible and violent crimes that it is used to punish, c) that it is the only way to truly stop such a criminal from committing future acts of violence, and finally d) that it is the only just response to such violent crimes. The first two of these have been proven categorically false or causally vague (that is, it’s nearly impossible to tell whether or not implementation of the death penalty is a cause of lower rates of violent crime), and the third is counterintuitive; are death row inmates in maximum security categorically and uniquely more dangerous to society than other inmates convicted of similar crimes? Are there no solutions to such a finding other than killing them? The fourth response merits a little more attention.

Many like to think of the justice system’s role as deciding the correct penance for those convicted of crimes. The very notion of “justice” invokes the idea of punishment in response to transgression; paying back a debt to society with your own time or resources. Working from this conception of justice, many have determined that those who are found to have committed some of the most heinous acts conceivable deserve, in full retributive manner, death. I have no critique of this; maybe they do “deserve” death. The eye-for-an-eye perspective is simple but intuitive, and is sometimes a completely understandable first reaction to a crime.

However, it is important to never forget what the government, and especially the justice system, is. For all the incredible thought, all of the honest and earnest work and scholarship, all of the time spent creating a rulebook by which we govern our society, we must always remember that it was created and executed by humans. The justice system is an imperfect one, and it is so precisely because its motor continues to be us. Well-meaning but imperfect, irrational, us.

Humans have an occasional tendency to be unreasonable, to make the wrong decisions based on everything from misunderstandings of facts to cognitive biases that we ourselves are blind to. There are entire fields of research dedicated to human decision making in all its complexities. When emotions and passions come into play, our irrationality multiplies, making our decisions even less grounded in reality.

This vulnerability to irrationality is endemic to all human decisions. The problem I am describing is then relevant to all actions within the justice system. But that does not mean that a well-designed system, one with dedicated and open-minded practitioners, cannot overcome many of these human errors when they arise. Examples of such checks of irrationality are pardons, exonerations, and retrials, as they admit potential mistakes made by anyone through the course of the process. Although mistakes occur, we have ways to correct or reverse most of them when they do.

And so comes my distaste for capital punishment at any level. Imagine staring a convicted, cold-blooded murderer in the face and feeling not a shred of emotion. Emotion that clouds judgment, that gets in the way of rational thinking. The death penalty allows no room for irrationality in precisely the cases that most influence our passions. If this occurs at any point in the process that leads to one’s death, there is no way to correct the mistake. There are no true exonerations for the dead, there is no bringing back the innocent or undeserving that have died after a stay on death row. Regardless, we continue to argue about whether capital punishment is useful, ethical, or practical. But how often do we consider that we are making permanent, life-ending decisions with compromised methods?

I hope that this administration continues to take these questions seriously, and that we continue moving toward a justice system that recognizes its weak spots and adds checks to mitigate them. Merrick Garland and his office took a great first step, and there are more to take for the president, followed by the states. It is incumbent on those in power, those who answer questions of freedom and decide futures, to exercise humility; humility to recognize not only potential faults, but shortcomings, the limits of a human system’s capabilities. The justice system, written and acted upon by humans, was never going to be able to solve the issue of our own vulnerability to unreasonableness. Therefore, when deciding whether or not such a human system should be able to deal in death, it is better to err on the side of caution and say “no.”

A strange debate is taking place in Missouri over an innocent man’s life. On one side sit those who argue for the release of Kevin Strickland, 62, who has been locked up for 43 years for a triple homicide that he maintains he did not commit. On the other side sits, essentially, just Missouri Gov. Mike Parson. After decades of Strickland’s own legal struggles from an initial Missouri Supreme Court hearing in 1980 to a 2017 Denial of Post-Conviction Relief affirmed by the Missouri appellate court (under then Attorney General Josh Hawley), Strickland’s petition for pardon has landed on the desk of Gov. Parson. The Governor, at this crucial moment in the aging inmate’s life, is wary to sign it. All the while, the Missouri Senate was working on and has now passed a bill containing language that could make Strickland’s freedom conceivable even without the aid of a pardon. The bill, SB53, now also sits on Parson’s desk, waiting to be signed into law. Parson was recently quoted saying he expects that he will sign the bill into law effective this August, but does this go far enough for Strickland’s case? (hint: I do not think so)

Strickland was sentenced to one count of capital murder and two counts of second degree murder to be served concurrently in relation to a triple homicide that occured on April 25, 1978, in Kansas City, Missouri. Since his conviction, he has maintained his innocence, saying that he was at home watching TV and talking to his girlfriend on the phone, an alibi that his family members corroborate. Nevertheless, Mr. Strickland was found guilty. He was 18 years old at the time of the murders.

The case against him relied heavily on an eyewitness account from the only surviving victim, Cynthia Douglas, who was 20 years old at the time. She identified two of the defendants, Vincent Bell and Kilm Adkins, the night of the murder, and stated that night that she did not know the other two involved in the shooting, only to testify against Strickland the next day and then again in trial. In modern cases this would have been weak evidence against Strickland given what we now know about the veracity of eyewitness accounts, especially delayed ones like this. Another key (but, in my opinion, ridiculous) piece of evidence levied against him by the prosecution was the presence of Strickland’s fingerprints on the car of co-defendant Adkins. Somehow, this proof of Strickland’s very real friendship with Bell and Adkins was twisted to be used as evidence supporting his participation in a murder. These were the most salient pieces of evidence against Strickland. After a hung jury in his first trial (11/1 among 11 white jurors and one Black juror), an all-white jury found him guilty.

I hesitate to spend any more of the readers’ or my own time recounting the evidence of this man’s innocence here. For more who attest to his innocence, look to current Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney Jean Peters Baker. Look to co-defendants Bell and Adkins, who stated to investigators that Strickland had nothing to do with the crime while they plead guilty, and key witness Douglas who expressed regret over her role in the trial in 2015. Look to James Bell and John O’Connor, who both worked in the office of the prosecutor at the time and attested to Strickland’s innocence after re-reviewing the facts, or any of the Missouri State Senators who sent a bi-partisan letter to the Governor urging him to pardon. I cannot blame you should you still hesitate to believe this incredible case. I urge you to review the case yourself and check out the Midwest Innocence Project’s “Suggestions in Support of Petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus.”

But even in the face of such a widely acknowledged and glaring lack of evidence against Mr. Strickland, Gov. Parson has refused to budge, letting the pardon petition gather dust while Strickland continues to sit in prison. When pressed on the issue by reporters, Parson has said “there is a lot more information out there,” appealing to the case’s complexity and that he is not “willing to put other people at risk” by letting Strickland go free, a clear mistreatment of the facts and neglect of his ability to salvage the freedom of an innocent man. To be clear, stating that the case is “more complicated” is simply not true, and suggests he believes that others who read the case lack the ability to clearly understand the information presented to them. As a rule, I think we should be wary of people who say something is “more complicated” than it seems while refusing to say in what ways. It likely is not. In a recent interview, Parson showed all of his cards, saying “nobody has been proven innocent here in the court of law, you know, is the bottom line.” I feel ridiculous even pointing out what is wrong with that sentence.

In the same interview, Parson references the new Bill 53, saying that he anticipates it will get signed into law this coming August. If this happens, Strickland will be given a potential route to freedom, which County Prosecutor Baker has personally promised to help him navigate. But is August enough? The matter is urgent. Every second that Strickland remains in prison is a second in which the state of Missouri robs him of his civil liberties, a second in which he continues to be a victim of legal red-tape and indifference to injustice. Consider the fact that his co-defendants that plead guilty spent about 10 years each imprisoned for a gruesome triple homicide while Strickland has spent 42 years in prison in a country that touts freedom and fair treatment under the law as its principle values. SB53, no doubt, will make the lives of future wrongfully convicted inmates much easier, but Strickland’s case requires so much more than his release. Through this pardon, Gov. Parson has the power to send a profound message on behalf of justice, a message of regret and a promise of dedication to the innocent. Kevin Strickland will never receive true justice. When asked what justice looked like to him, he said “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet.” But, if Parson acts with urgency using the pardon for its true purpose (to correct and express remorse over the inevitable but hopefully rare mistakes of the criminal justice system), he can give Kevin Strickland a glimpse of the promise this country made upon his birth.

So, Gov. Parson, you have come into contact with the rare case of a moral binary. You have two choices, one good, one bad: waste no more time and set a deserving man free, or let him spend more time in prison for a crime for which his innocence is not even in question. Prove to us that the freedom of innocent Missourans is your priority, or prove to us that your apathy towards injustice is truly unshakable. Every day that goes by without a pardon for Strickland suggests the latter.

Sign this petition addressed to Parson to support Mr. Strickland and to advocate for his freedom.

Vaping devices and other nicotine products have been received with mixed feelings since their introduction in the United States in 2006. Many claim they are a safe alternative to cigarettes and can thus aid smoking cessation, while others see their dangerous chemicals and a potential inverse effect in which these devices could be a gateway to get non-smokers (especially young first-timers and “social smokers”) to try electronic cigarettes’ infamous cousin.

Cigarette smoking itself has steadily declined in the U.S. adult population since 1966, from 42.6% to just 13.8% by 2018. Part of this decline is likely due to shifting public opinion about cigarettes in the face of studies proving their danger. Unfortunately, however, this trend was not mirrored by the country’s youth. Call it teenage rebellion, call it misinformation or even plain angst. The American Lung Association reported an almost 10% increase in youth cigarette smoking rates from 1991 to 1997 (from 27.5% to 36.4%). From then on, however, rates of smoking increase have dropped sharply to well below 10%.

Beyond the high volume of anti-cigarette advocacy and research, many attribute this drop to landmark lawsuits against Big Tobacco culminating in the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA), a contract in which some of tobacco’s largest companies settled litigation with 46 U.S. states and five territories. Within the MSA were new requirements that kneecapped the companies’ marketing abilities. Among these are the complete prohibition of targeting minors in ads; selling merchandise with brand logos; and outdoor, billboard, and public transit advertising. Really, the MSA was a shining victory in the fight against teen-targeted smoking advertising — and when an industry spends over 7.62 billion dollars a year on marketing and advertising, they can expect a shock to their system after agreeing to such sweeping prohibitions.

The benefit of a device like a Juul (one of the most popular vaping devices on the market) is that they provide an opportunity to alleviate “industry standard” pressure felt by cigarette companies because they are selling a different product. Therefore, a company that sells vaping devices simply does not feel the direct pressure from old Big Tobacco lawsuits. Of course, these e-cigarette companies came on the scene well after the MSA, so they did not feel any of its influence at the time. Even still, the standard that the MSA put in place would have retroactively pressured a new company to fall in line. The real trick of the Juul or e-cigarette, however, is the novelty. Medical, and now public, understanding of cigarettes is that they are indisputably dangerous to your health and well-being. The same cannot quite be said for the public opinion about vaping devices. It is difficult to regulate these products when people lack solid understanding about their effects. Thus, ads nearly copying pre-MSA cigarette ads (adjusted for trends and aesthetics) were free to circulate.

As we saw above, youth smoking rates are declining. This statistic is at least a little heartening, though we may need to update the data we look at to get the full picture. Current “tobacco use” by high school students in 2018 was reportedly 27.1%, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey. Also shown was a steady increase in vaping among this demographic since 2011. Tobacco companies are taking notice of this shift; old tobacco giants like Altria and Phillip-Morris have even gotten skin in the game, buying up stock of newer, smaller (in comparison) e-cigarette companies, likely to offset their losses in cigarette sales.

E-cigarettes, then, are the undisputed rising stars in the tobacco world, both to customers and the rest of the industry. Their rise may be attributed to the fact that they substitute the scientifically proven danger of cigarettes for a sort of speculative danger, one that those looking for an excuse to vape can easily refute. But science and attorneys are following suit, shifting their focus to e-cigarettes and vaping devices rather than cigarettes and smokeless tobacco. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institute of Health have awarded $151 million in grants to research. With this funding, researchers can investigate tobacco, including health of effects e-cigarettes and marketing for the financial years 2018-2022, through their Tobacco Centers of Regulatory Science program.

Alongside the scientific shift in focus is a recent, but palpable, legal focus on the strategies of e-cigarette companies. One legal battle that gained notoriety in recent years is North Carolina v. Juul. The complaint, brought about by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, details the company’s customer demographic, their early marketing campaigns and their failure to gain or even seek FDA approval as a designated cessation aid. All of these examples support Stein’s claim that Juul played a large role in the nicotine addiction of this generation. Specifically, Stein says they helped to “reverse the historic decline in teen tobacco use.” Looking at the tobacco use trends noted above, it will be hard to refute these claims, and failure to do so (and do so decidedly) could land Juul in hot water.

The thing about tobacco products is that because they kill off their most loyal customers, and because adults are simply less likely to start smoking, the most powerful and important advertising will always be that which targets kids (if you’re already addicted to nicotine, you don’t need much of a push to keep using it). Regulations and lawsuits like those mentioned above are certainly starting to catch up and hold these companies accountable, but they cannot be fully responsible. An unknown, but likely high, number of teens have started vaping in the few years since North Carolina lodged its initial complaint against Juul. If we let vape companies tell us that their products are safe and only intended to be a cessation aid, we are falling into marketing schemes the same way that our grandparents did when Lucky Strike called their cigarettes “toasted” or when Camel said they were the most popular cigarette among doctors. In the meantime, while legal battles are fought and scientific studies are conducted, we — as the generation being marketed to — should do our best to not shovel dollars into the companies that are responsible for the deaths of millions and that pay for the very ads that get more of us addicted. Getting us addicted to e-cigarettes is, in the end, the only way that tobacco giants can stay in business, or at least retain a shred of the power they had in the last century.